Soul Food

Being a seminarian of modest means, typically I forgo the finer things in life.  But last night they came to me right here on this beautiful campus I am so fortunate as to call home.  There are two art exhibits on campus, and two artist’s receptions were held last night replete with the requisite wine and cheese.  Since I seldom get gourmet cheese or any kind of wine these days, naturally I attended both.  Brie has never tasted so good.  And don’t even get me started on the chevre!

While both artists are gifted, I was most enraptured by the work of Dr. Tom Duff.  A surgeon by training, Tom has spent his leisure time producing a substantial body of work depicting images from Dante’s Divine Comedy.  I’d tried to read Dante on my own at nineteen, made it through two of the three volumes, and quit during Paradiso because it seemed to me Dante had an axe to grind which for some reason turned me off.  Tom was there to talk about his work, as was a leading Dante scholar from Yale Divinity School, Professor Peter Hawkins.  The evening was far richer than I’d anticipated.

Tom drew Satan as described by Dante.  The notation beside the piece called attention to a tidbit I’d overlooked in my reading: not only was Satan devouring sinners, but he was crying the whole while.  Satan suffers an inner hunger that cannot be satisfied under any circumstances because he is utterly separated from grace.  It reminded me of the “hungry ghosts” that Thich Nhat Hanh describes—people who are starving for soul food but their necks are so narrow they’re unable to swallow it.  It occurred to me that almost anything I could call “sin” is most likely caused by that insatiable hunger, that pain and fear resulting from a profound sense of disconnection. 

What I hadn’t known before last night was that Dante placed the story in the year 1300, when he had been at the pinnacle of his worldly success and power.  Just a few short years later he was exiled and all of his worldly possessions seized, during which time he conceived of his Divine Comedy.  Hence the axe to grind.  Tom’s opening piece was a depiction of these words from the opening of Inferno: “Midway upon the road of our life I found myself within a dark wood, for the clear path had been lost.” In his fictional journey Dante had to dive down into the pits of Hell in order to come out the other side, but he does indeed come out the other side.  Dante says “upon the road of our life” because he knows his is a universal story.  While we don’t all suffer the same devastating losses and betrayals endured by Dante, we do all suffer and from time to time feel as though we have lost our way.

But here’s the really beautiful part.  Dante’s Heaven is an indescribably pure white rose.  Tom painted this rose with lavender tones, and Peter asked, “why lavender?”  Tom said “I needed the contrast. If I’d painted the pure white rose Dante described, it would be a blank canvass.  You wouldn’t be able to see it.”  Tom’s depiction of the rose was beyond beautiful, maybe what the Universe would look like if you could step outside of it.  A blank white canvass couldn’t move the soul nearly that well.  And maybe that’s the thing about heaven, and about life.  We need the dark bits to frame the beauty of the light bits.  Without them, we couldn’t even see heaven because there would be no contrast…just a blank white canvass.